1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to information retrieval, and particularly to an image retrieval system and method.
2. Description of Related Art
With the rapid development of multimedia technology and computer networks, digital images are widespread. Presently, popular search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN, provide an image retrieval function for searching images of interest. Most image retrievals add metadata, such as captions, keywords and/or descriptions to the images, and search the images according to the metadata. Such image retrieval is referred to as text-based image retrieval. However, if images similar to an exemplary image are required to be found from an image database, the text-based image retrieval cannot fulfill the image search task. In addition, most image related applications require much computation. Therefore, it may take a long time to implement the image retrieval.